Bad Mail, Bad News

One of the common metaphors for the Internet is to describe it as the "Wild West." That implies that while there is much civilized behavior, outlaws and bandits are everywhere. And there are darn few lawmen to track them down. Given the paucity of lawmen, the only defense is to arm oneself (I'm still talking about the Internet here).

Last week, a series of "spoofed" e-mails made their way around the Internet and into many e-mail inboxes. The message, which was purported to be from CNN, then led the reader to sites which either phished for the reader's confidential personal information or attacked directly by downloading a virus or other malware. CNN, of course, had nothing to do with the messages.

Beyond the usual anti-virus, anti-spam, and firewall software, I have found a couple additional tools which help a little bit. Both are free.

One from TrendMicro's set of free services is a product called "Trend Micro E-Mail ID (beta)." The product validates the source of e-mail, but only from about 350 companies. CNN is not one of them. Still, it's a help. Validated e-mails are shown with a "TrueMark" icon next to each message in the inbox. It works with the major webmail services and with Outlook Express.

From my Hotmail inbox. Items 3 and 4 are malicious spam. The rest are legitimate.


Another free product is McAfee SiteAdvisor. This product adds safety ratings to sites. The ratings are generated from a combination of user reviews and automated spidering of the subject sites. The Advisor button resides in a toolbar and changes color based on the current site's rating. There are also indicators that display next to sites listed in Google and Yahoo searches.

Still, even with all the virus/spyware/malware/etc software you might employ, it's a rough world and you're never completely safe. Sometimes, even the sheriff got shot in the back, right? Maybe what the Internet needs is a Texas Ranger. "One Riot, One Ranger."